MaryAnn:

Hi White Rabbit,

I was wondering why you classify this psalm or any of the other psalms as poetry.

From your introductory paragraphs, I can see how the rules and conventions of the psalms' original Hebrew version are relevant to song lyrics. And as you know, the etymology of the word psalm reinforces the concept of a psalm as a song.

But I do not think that song lyrics are necessarily poems -- especially since poems are self-contained works, whereas the psalms need to be read/sung/chanted within the context of a set of religious beliefs in order to be fully experienced.

So I hope you will explain the criteria you used to classify psalms as poetry.

Mary Ann

Dear MaryAnn,

Gladly. For one thing, every biblical scholar (including the irreligious) classifies the Psalter as poetry due to its inherent verbal characteristics (particularly the peculiar genius of biblical Hebrew poetics, that of parallelism). In fact many now classify what used to be considered biblical Hebrew prose as poetry (although it still would definitely fall on the spectrum from "prose poetry" to "poetry"). No one in the field would think that the religious (or even the original melodic) context of the Psalms would exclude them as being self-contained poetry, on the basis of the words alone. The problem for them is that they've gotten so used to looking at Hebrew Scripture as poetry that many don't understand how one can classify the Psalms as song (rather than just poetry to which melody can be added arbitrarily, as in the "primitive" forms of synagogue chant). Ironic, isn't it, what one's specialization can do to one's outlook?

Our Western experience leads us to a false dichotomy when we look at ancient poetry -- unless we are very careful. In antiquity, all over the known world, poetry and song were not two different things -- they were one and the same thing, by definition. Poetry was always sung, and song was always poetic -- the melody giving the equivalent of the vocal inflection of speech. Melopoesis -- I don't know if anyone else uses that excellent Greek description, but that's what we're dealing with in all of Hebrew Scripture. Even in the Western world, it took a long time for melody to be divorced from poetry (I have read that this is one reason why rhyme arose), and even then the divorce was (as it were) amicable.

The real mystery is why there is so little written musical notation accompanying ancient sung poetry (aside from the Masoretic tradition). There are reasons for this. In the case of Greek poetry, the meaning of the musical signs had been largely forgotten by the early Christian era, and so when the texts were recopied, the musical signs were omitted. In many other cases -- including Hebrew Scripture and many medieval Christian liturgical texts -- the written notation was kept secret among the initiated and taught hand-to-eye (and mouth-to-ear) by means of gestures (chironomy). We see this being done in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia as well: gestures were the basis of "classical" music in those cultures. But sometimes the notation was preserved while the meaning was not -- this happened in Hebrew Scripture and also in the Armenian Christian liturgical texts -- and so the notation has had to be deciphered.

Cheers,
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